Dominick was Roman Catholic.  Back in the dark ages of the 60s, Roman Catholics were not allowed to eat meat on Friday.  Pat, the only other Protestant, aside from myself, remarked, "Exactly."  You see Dominick had a knack of sharing in eating the pizza, but never sharing in paying for the pizza. That night Dominick had to be satisfied with, just soda, or he would have to buy a plain pizza.

He chose the former, but he didn’t stop complaining about the fact that he couldn’t have any pizza.

To talk about fasting today, one might think you are talking about eating at a fast food restaurant.

Occasionally you will hear of someone fasting so they can quickly drop 10 lbs. so they can squeeze into the bathing suit they bought for vacation.  Once in a while you hear of a prisoner fasting, in an effort to have his demands satisfied. Other than these isolated situations fasting is something most people don’t do.

When was the last time you heard someone fasting for spiritual reasons?  When was the last time you fasted?  I’ll be honest. I haven’t fasted in 20 years.

Fasting is a discipline found throughout the Bible.  It is a discipline which Moses practiced for forty days and nights waiting for a revelation from God. Daniel fasted as he waited God’s word.  Jesus fasted as he waited the ordeal of temptation.  When the Israelite nation was faced with disaster, King Jehoshaphat proclaimed a fast, so they could seek out God.  The Pharisees in Jesus’ day fasted, but Jesus warned us,

"Whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites."

What exactly is fasting?

The kind of fasting the Bible talks about is not the kind I talked about in the July news letter.  Giving up an ice cream sundae weekly and donating the cost of that sundae to the church.  While that may be a very small step, the type of fasting which the Bible speaks of involves more than abstaining from all foods.

Fasting is going without food for a purpose:

To spend time in prayer

To teach self discipline

To remind us that we can live with a lot less

To help us to appreciate God’s gifts.

As we celebrate our 223 birthday as a free nation, we must acknowledge the abuses of those freedoms.  The right to bear arms has lead to drive-by shootings and classrooms massacres.  The right to free speech has lead to profanity.  Freedom of religion, has become freedom from religion and the ridiculing of the absolute truth of God’s Word.  Freedom of the press has produced scandal sheets.  Citizens complain about $100 increase in yearly property taxes because of the school budget, yet spend several hundred dollars a year buying lottery tickets.

The woes of our country are great.  The need for fasting is even greater.  Not the kind of fasting that the Pharisees practiced.  They fasted 2 times a week to impress the people of their holiness.  Their fasting was a deliberate demonstration, not to God, but to humanity, of how devoted and disciplined they were.  They took deliberate steps to make sure others knew they were fasting.  This is the kind of fasting which Jesus condemned,

"And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting."

Fasting should be a deliberate attempt to draw the attention of God, to prove penitence was real.  Fasting is not designed to save a person’s soul as to move God to liberate the nation, the community, the family of its distress.

The Old Testament priest Ezra made the Israelites pause at the river Ahava, before beginning their 900 mile journey home, a trip through dangerous and difficult territory.  The reason for pausing,

"Then I proclaimed a fast there at the river of Ahava, that we might deny ourselves before our God, to seek from Him a safe journey for ourselves, our children and all our possessions."      Ezra 8:21.

Their prayers were answered.

As we celebrate the last birthday of this nation in this millennium, there is no great time to renew a commitment to the spiritual discipline of fasting.  Our journey into a new century, in some ways, may not be as difficult or as dangerous as the Israelites’, but then in other ways in may be even more dangerous.

Whether you refrain from eating an ice cream sundae or a single meal daily.  Or whether you choose to fast for an entire day once a week or once a month. It seems the time is right for all Christian’s to embrace the discipline of fasting. So that we may sincerely approach God with humility and sorrow for sin and urgently pray for our nation, to become more disciplined, to learn to live with less, and to become even more appreciative of God’s gifts.

In the word’s of the prophet Joel,

"Sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the house of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord.

Amen

Reverend Richard Hayes Weyer